On NetTuts.com today they've posted the start of a new series looking at the creation of a RESTful API with the help of the Laravel 4 framework (in beta at the time of this post).

RESTful API's are hard! There are a lot of aspects to designing and writing a successful one. For instance, some of the topics that you may find yourself handling include authentication, hypermedia, versioning, rate limits, and content negotiation. Rather than tackling all of these concepts, however, let's instead focus on the basics of REST. We'll make some JSON endpoints behind a basic authentication system, and learn a few Laravel 4 tricks in the process.

Their API example is a "read it later" kind of application where users can store links to URLs they want to read later. They walk you through the installation of the framework, creation/configuration of the database and include the migrations to set it up. From there they help you set up the models, some authentication and routing. Finally, they get to the controllers and the functionality of the application, creating the URL controller to handle the creation, listing and updating of the resources.